Ellen Tuyisenga has the answer. It came to her one day in the field, as she talked with friends about earnings from the previous bean harvest. One lady recounted that she had made more than US$1,000. Then her husband took the money away, leaving her with nothing. “I saw how hard the women worked, but they could not makeRead More …

The scene captured in this black and white photograph from March 1980 holds a special significance for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). The week that these people met in Lilongwe, Malawi, they made a piece of CIAT history. While the idea of CIAT branching out of Latin America to share its bean expertise in Africa had beenRead More …

We invite you to feast your eyes and your mind on the online version of CIAT’s Annual Report 2014-2015: Pathways to Development Impact – our first virtual and fully interactive publication*. Like our printed annual reports of the past, this one offers a comprehensive overview of the Center’s achievements in the last year – including its contributions to theRead More …

This post first appeared on the CCAFS website. Climate change has serious implications for food security. Chaotic weather patterns and more intense droughts or flooding events are impacting food availability and production in ways that farmers cannot predict. In this context, food and water sources become more unpredictable and scarce, and women face loss of income, harvest, and increased laborRead More …

This post first appeared on the Thomson Reuters Foundation climate blog. Ahead of the Global Landscape Forum in Peru, it helps to remember exactly why landscapes are important. They give us the bigger picture, to connect the dots between the many people who use an ecosystem and what for. It’s that bigger picture which helps put climate change into perspective. InRead More …

Wielding a hammer, John Kabola steps back and surveys his day’s work. The quarry cut into the hills of Kenya’s Upper Tana watershed reveals deep layers of earth like a sliced cake. Quarry stones are in demand – the construction industry is thriving. That’s good news for Kabola, who has risen to quarry operator, investing his income in aRead More …

If only we could put a little bit of extra carbon into our soils – that could save the planet from overheating, or so the theory goes. After all, of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing global temperatures to rise, and thus climate change, carbon dioxide (CO2) is by far the most important. Put carbonRead More …